Habitat for Humanity

This year for my corporate sponsored community service day I decided to sign up for Habitat for Humanity...partially because I waited so long to sign up and it was pretty much the only thing left, and partially because each year I consider it and then usually change to something else due to location and ease of getting there by train.

The house we worked on was in Patterson NJ. I have never really been to a city like Patterson - where the whole thing just seems like the town is dying and run down. I'm not going to lie, I was a little scared driving through there. I borrowed my friend's car and ended up getting lost because apparently the thing to do in Patterson is to steal the street signs. I'm not joking when I say that about 60% of the street signs were missing. I had no idea where I was going and the neighborhood was pretty shady.

After finding the place, we got right to work putting in subflooring which was kind of exciting for me. I hadn't done any real home improvement-type stuff since I left my house in Salt Lake (minus putting in a linoleum tile floor in my apartment).

There was a typical 'girly girl' that had signed up for the event. She stood around for a few hours and did NOTHING - which was very annoying. She did spend a lot of time texting though... I finally looked at her while the rest of us were working and asked her if she wanted me to show her how to hammer in nails. She reluctantly agreed and I got to watch her fumble with the hammer one nail at a time. It was actually kind of funny considering she was wearing her Juicy Coture and seemed worried about breaking a nail. She disappeared a few more times, then disappeared for good. Why on earth would she sign up for an event like this? Maybe she was in the same boat as me, ran out of choices. But I am guessing that it was more that she ran out of choices but still wanted a free day off of work. She is not in the pic since she disappeared or I would have pointed her out to you.